First Year Potions Class
by Gryngolet
Summary: Professor Snape reflects on Neville and Harry while teaching a class of first years during The Order of the Phoenix. Nothing doing, really, little more than a drabble. Just trying to work my way through my fascination with this character. No spanking in this one.


The first years seemed to be getting younger every year, thought Professor Severus Snape as he glided among the desks, watching his class of Hufflepuffs and Ravenclaws try, with the usual varying levels of success, to mix a calming draught. Perhaps it was just that he himself was getting older, farther removed each year from when he had been as innocent and clueless as his charges. If he had ever been that innocent. He stopped a boy who looked no older than 9 from adding powdered hypernium to his cauldron before he had even stirred in the essence of rosehips, murmured a correction, and moved on. Perhaps in this class was this year's Neville Longbottom, a boy so clumsy and wrong-footed in Potions that he had been Snape's natural foil for five years, the student who could always be relied upon to show the rest of the class what _not_ to do.

He'd felt a twinge of regret the year before last when Professor Lupin, then the Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher, had told him that Neville was so frightened of him that when he faced a boggart it had taken Snape's shape, and had attempted to go a bit easier on the hapless Gryffindor since then. Though there was a confidence in the way Longbottom looked at him now that made him wonder if he wasn't seeing the boggart-Snape in his grandmother's clothes whenever he looked at the real potions-master. At least there had been fewer in-class disasters caused by Neville since then.

Thinking of Longbottom led naturally to thoughts of his classmate, Harry Potter. Snape was worried about the boy, worried that he would not measure up to what he had to do. This one boy was supposed to save the entire wizarding world, and yet he couldn't even manage to hold his temper in front of an officious toad like Dolores Jane Umbridge. If he couldn't show even that much restraint, how was the Order of the Phoenix supposed to keep him alive long enough to have a ghost of chance when he did face the Dark Lord?

He moved forward, stopping in front of a tiny Hufflepuff girl who had to stand on her chair to be able to reach the bottom of her cauldron. The potion simmering there was coming along nicely, with the correct wisps of violet smoke. He waited to make sure that she properly added the last ingredient, the oil of loversknot, which was the only part of this potion that was at all dangerous. He thought again of Umbridge, who had forbidden him to teach something as useful and common as a strengthening potion when she had inspected his class of fifth-years the previous day. The Ministry thought it was too dangerous. Snape well knew that the Ministry thought it was too dangerous for _them_, if students who might be loyal to Dumbledore knew things that could be useful to them in a fight. That there was a possibility that it would come to that, a fight between the ministry of Magic and Dumbledore and those loyal to him. Snape was frowning over the possibility when a noise of glass chattering on iron recalled him to the present and he refocused on the student, whose eyes had gone big as saucers as she watched him. She was trying to add the required three drops of loversknot oil to finish her potion, but her hands were shaking so badly the lip of the bottle was clinking against the rim of her cauldron. Snape immediately softened his expression and his voice as he reached and took the girl's hands, enfolding them within his own and stopping her from adding anything to her cauldron.

"Miss – Finchley, is it? If you should add more than the prescribed three drops of loversknot oil the potion will boil over, and you will end with painful and odorous blisters on whatever skin it manages to touch. I suggest you calm yourself, wait until your hands are steady, and then add the ingredient." He waited, patiently, while the child got her fear under control and her hands stopped shaking. He released her hands and watched carefully while he she let fall three precise drops into her cauldron and stirred it. The violet smoke changed to pale blue, and the potion thickened.

"Very good, Miss Finchley. Five points to Hufflepuff."

He walked on, checking the potions of the three students in the next row, and was about to make his way back to the front of the room when a whoosh and a cry from behind him turned him around. Sighing, he walked quickly back to the young-looking Ravenclaw boy he had corrected before, and vanished the green, boiling potion from his cauldron before prying the child's hands away from his face. He was wailing in pain, which paradoxically assured Snape that he wasn't badly hurt. If it had been very serious the boy would have been too shocked to cry.

"Calm down, Mr. Baldrick, you're not dying. Finchley, bring a flask of your potion here." He forced Baldrick to drink a mouthful of the calming draught, and the student did stop his howling, his face going somewhat slack and dreamy, though he continued cry quietly. A very adequate calming draught. His mouth compressed at the blisters that were rising along the side of the boy's face where the potion, obviously having been over-fortified with loversknot, had splashed him. "You'll have to go to the hospital wing. Come along, I'll take you." He put a hand on the boy's shaking back and raised his voice to be heard above the slight commotion the accident had caused. "The rest of you, re-read the instructions, but do not do anything else to your potions until I return. I will take 50 points from the house of any student who so much as touches their cauldron in my absence. Is that understood?" He met the eye of each student in the room in turn and waited for their nods and murmurs of assent before he left with the unfortunate Baldrick, He thought he did have this year's Longbottom on his hands, and perhaps the little Hufflepuff was this year's Granger. He wondered if Hogwarts would be standing long enough for these students to reach their seventh year.


End file.
